E-Commerce for All

We all worry about the security of our websites, but do you maintain your computer properly to avoid transferring malware and trojans to your website?

Fact is, we know most of you do not. We find that overall people do not take the necessary and proper steps to keep their computer and it’s software up to date and patched…. It’s a silent hacker!

Whether you have a static HTML website, blog or shopping cart… You are at risk of hacking your own website and spreading malware to your visitors…. Or worse, compromising their information and security while transacting on your website. Not to mention that most times Google will find the malware/hack before you and tag your listing or remove you from the index!

According to Web security firm McAfee’s second-quarter data, Malware reached its highest levels ever in the first half of 2010. The company found 6 million malicious files in the second quarter, making for a total of 10 million malicious files over the first six months of the year.

So we are going to give some tips to help you keep your computer up to date and your site’s visitors safe. These tips are a culmination of stuff provided to us from our ISP, our webhost and our son Troy the PC guy. We often share this list with customers to help them stay safe and will today share it with all of you. Stopping incidental and accidental malware and viruses from the Internet starts with you.

1. Make sure you have good virus software and it’s up to date. Troy recommends AVG for a very powerful and free solution. I personally use McAfee, but it is a paid solution.
2. Keep all your software (especially internet related software) such as browsers, plug-ins and add-ons up to date with the latest security patches. Examples are Adobe Reader, Flash, and Java. You can check whether your Firefox plugins are up to date at Mozilla Plugin Check…. And for secure browsing we do recommend Firefox or Chrome as your browser of choice, as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been historically subjected to the largest number of security threats.
3. Change your passwords regularly and do NOT store them in your browser. Strong passwords of at least 8 characters with numbers, letters and symbols will protect you best. Use a different password in every location.
4. Keep your computer’s operating system up to date. Software manufacturers release updates in response to bugs, and other changes… But most importantly in response to security issues discovered after release.
5. Do NOT access your website’s administration section from a public or unsecured wireless network… EVER!
6. Make sure your home or office’s wireless network is secured and closed to all but you and your staff. Here is an excellent tutorial. Have you heard of the new trendy hacker thing called “Drive By Hacking” or “Wardriving” … Check it out.
7. Limit access between computers on your network to all but that which is necessary (file sharing).
8. Get a good malware scanner for your computer, something like Malwarebytes is free and excellent.
9. Avoid adding unnecessary toolbars and plugins to your browser.
10. NEVER click cancel or another selection on popups in websites. It’s usually a trick. So if something pops up that is begging to to click to scan or similar…. Instead of clicking shut your browser down immediately and scan your machine.
11. Make certain your computer’s firewall is enabled, up to date and correctly configured at all times.
12. Whenever possible access your site’s admin, hosting control panel or FTP in a secured SSL connection to help prevent eavesdropping.
13. Know your computer’s normal processes and occasionally monitor what is running in your task manager or similar.
14. Only install software, addons and plugins from trusted publishers… Make sure all applications are signed so that you know what they are while monitoring your processes. When installing software always choose advanced or custom install as many are bundled with toolbars and other garbage you will unknowing install.
15. NEVER click links in emails or messages that look fishy or are from an unknown sender. If you get a PayPal letter, for example, asking you to update your information, view the link in your mouseover to see if it’s really from PayPal and look at the email address of the sender. When in doubt do not click the link and access the website directly by typing the url you KNOW to be correct in your address bar.
16. Never download attachments from senders you do not know… and scan them first even if you know them
17. Even if you do not normally visit gambling, p o r n or other known platforms for extreme malware, you should use a rootkit detection tool occasionally. Anti-Rootkit for example is free and does an excellent job.

Now, saying you will do these things is not enough. You have to actually do them. Set your scanners to run daily in your task scheduler, while you are sleeping even. Set your computer’s operating system updates to automatic, and think before you click. These are the things we charge you with to help make the Internet a little safer for all users…. It starts with you and your website, we all share this very important responsibility.

Melanie Off Topic, Small Business

The Internet has grown in to an opinionated, buzz driven machine. Websites seek user interaction, comments and participation, social media sharing, user specific search result weighting and more. This is all well and good until someone bad mouths you, your website or business. The things that can happen from a loose lipped comment or click are not only very dangerous, but apparently more interesting than good notations! Face it haven’t you shopped on eBay and searched that sellers ratings until you located the one bad one? It’s human nature, we are rubber neckers!

Customers behave in the same manner… 1000 great orders delivered fast and perfectly, no comments at all. 1 distribution screw up, and boom you are ranking on page one for “XYC company are idiots!” Some will say. “it’s not fair”… Tell you what I tell my kids, “Life is not fair”. Just like anything else in life, if it’s worth it…. It’s also hard work. You will have to fix this.

So today we will cover some of the things that can happen to your business, and some ways to “fix” the problems created.

While these interactive services are a wonderful part of the web, they are also easily misused and cheated as well. This is not however the most common problem, most times it’s that one bad order that will sting you. So spend your time concentrating on fixing the issue and not finding the competitor who caused it.

Some Ways You Can be Hurt by User Supplied Information on The Web

Testimonials: We know these can be a great thing for your business, but they can be a silent killer as well. Sites like GetFave.com and RipOffReport.com allow users to say what they like without much if any supporting information. These types of sites have essentially un-moderated content by way of making the “submitter” solely responsible for their own ….. Searchable content!

Product Reviews: Word of mouth advertising for products and services is as old as human commerce. These types of customer generated comments have often been the maker or breaker of small businesses for some time. A good review in a newspaper could send your business soaring to the top, while a bad one could sink your boat. This hasn’t changed much in theory, the dangers and territory have expanded. So instead of waiting out a poor review in a newspaper for 6 months that touched your local area, you now are dealing with a global area and a potentially unlimited time line.

Security Reports: For ecommerce this is a BIG deal, tools like McAfee SiteAdvisor and other toolbar phishing and security reporting devices can sting your business big time. These tools, while for the most part are fairly moderated can cause you terrible troubles if the not so savvy web user reports you for phishing or security issues. A great example is a client who was reported because his main page of his Zen Cart was NOT SSL encrypted. Why the hell would it be? But, McAfee accepted the report and was flagging the search results for the website for all of it’s users! While I am sure that the user who submitted the rating was honest and concerned, he/she was clearly NOT qualified to supply the report…. as a result the client’s business suffered while we attempted to work it out w/ McAfee.

Social Media: Sharing is the buzz word for this generation, and share we do. We share photos, experiences and of course the businesses we come in contact with as well. Again, just like we discussed, humans are far more likely to add a negative experience to their Facebook than a positive one. The dangers of not monitoring and involving your business in social media are exponential. The up side it that many social media users will ask advice before visiting a restaurant or making a purchase, and the responses from network friends will generally be positive in these cases.

As a shop owner there are some things you can do to monitor and influence these items. The term is actually a fairly new classification called “reputation management”. In essence this is the monitoring, management and repair of your’s, your business’, and/or your website’s online activity and reputation. There are professionals that can for a fee, provide these services to you… But we will try to help you, help yourself a bit first.

Monitoring Online Reputation

While we suggest you contact a professional for damage control and cleanup in the event you are “bad mouthed” on the web, there are many free tools you can use to monitor your online reputation yourself however.

• BackType: is a free search tool which will grab mentions of your company name, products, web site url etc. and deliver you results from social media, blogs and other user generated content sites on the web.
• Monitter: will scrape real time Twitter notations for up to 3 keywords at a time. Nice tool, but a bit addictive!
• Google Alerts: is by far the most comprehensive and my favorite. Way back when, originally suggested to me by the late David Castle, this tool scrapes anything you want from Google. Great for trends, keyword research and reputation management too!
• PureWireTrust: is an online search for email addresses, websites (places) and things. Results include social networking accounts, security, blacklisting, IP and WhoIs results.
• Yasni: is a pretty cool scraper for Google Blogs, web, etc… But most impressive is the “monitor tool” provided to email yourself results and save your results as well!
• BBB: has user submitted issues even if you are NOT a member. Note that at least these are well moderated user submitted comments.
• Google: is great for searching for things like your business/domain name and one of these the words: testimonials, reviews, complaints, reports etc.

Taking Action

There are many things you can do for yourself if you find your site in a reputation mess, BUT, we strongly suggest you at least consult a professional if you have been wrongly bad mouthed on the web.

1. Investigate the allegation: Do you know this user? Does the submitted report look real? Do they have the right site?
2. Contact the webmaster: Use the website’s contact information to inquire about the negative comments, provide your side of the story and request removal.
3. Make amends: Contact the user, offer to make it right…. Apologize. A wise restaurant manager (Rick Nader) once told me that customer complaints are a much greater opportunity to “wow” a customer than plain old great service. Making it right can be a huge word of mouth advertising tools for your website.
4. Address the issue: If you are unable to get the problem resolved/removed, then factually and honestly address it on your own blog or social media persona. Tell the truth, reference the page link of the negative comments and tell your side of the story in a very positive and constructive way.
5. Bomb the page: This is obviously a last resort, but popularity and freshness are huge in search engine ranking, so you can conceivably “bomb” the offending page with fresh positive results and push them down the SERPs (search results pages).

The moral of today’s post is that while nothing has changed in business reputation, the tools, playing field, influence and accessibility of these reports has grown to mammoth proportions…. And so must you step up and monitor your online reputation.

Melanie Small Business

Got Blog?

There has been an absolute onslaught of shop owners wanting a blog. This is not very unexpected, as the freshness and regularity of content carry far more weight then they ever have before in Google’s algorithm.

Certainly, I advise clients that this creation of fresh content on a regular business is a very good thing…. But I also tell them how NOT to shoot themselves in the foot.

Okay, so that sounds funny, but it’s very true…. Your shiny new blog can do you a huge disservice if you don’t know the basics. So today tonight I will attempt to give you new bloggers a fighting chance.

Perhaps in many cases the word content, by its very definition is too vague or not as descriptive as we mean to say. So if you read somewhere or your SEO tells you you need to create fresh content…. We should in fact say: You need to create unique, descriptive, fresh, honest, longtail keyword enriched content. Wow, that’s a mouthful. But, true none the less.

Unique is a word you should really wrap your head around for everything web you do. In a nutshell it means simply that the content is not published anywhere else on the web. So clearly grabbing those free articles and republishing them on your blog is not the ticket. Every page on your website should be unique from your other pages and all other web pages. It’s this uniqueness that holds the advantage.

Descriptive content is also often misunderstood. I will ask a client to write more descriptive product descriptions and he will provide me a product description with 50 key points in a bulleted list. Okay, so again, I was too vague… I mean that your pages should contain copy descriptive enough for users to read and scan naturally which generates an image or understanding of the product or page.

For example, if I called you on the phone to inquire about the widget for sale in your shopping cart, would you blow through 50 key points? No, you would use descriptive language and natural language to help me to visualize the product and it’s qualities. You would use examples and experiences to instill trust in your product, and lastly you would most certainly speak in a confident tone. My point is simple, you do not have to be a very talented writer to write descriptive text… Mostly, you just have to want to.

Fresh content is pretty simple to understand, this is new content. While updating existing pages is very good and important, your site will perform much better if you are creating new pages on a regular basis. Face it, this demonstrates both maintenance and growth.

Honest content is something every blogger should know and understand. This is simply the fact that this blog, while an incredible marketing tool is an extension of you and your company. These are posts, not white papers. Reach out to your readers, show some humanity and personality.

Sanitized blog posts will never bring you the readership and following needed to make your blog a success. If you are Joe, then blog as Joe…. Not admin. Make yourself approachable, identifiable and easy to follow, and your readers will love you.

Longtail keyword enriched content is rather a simple thing and easily accomplished. The best advice I can give you to create great longtail keywords is to refer to descriptive content above.

Too many times a week to count, clients will ask me what I think they should be targeting in their keywords. Now they don’t mean the Meta keyword tag, most of the time anymore… Instead they mean for me to give them a list of keywords to stuff in their content. Aside from coming up empty handed, they have now made me get my soap box out and begin to preach.

You see, most of you are not in a position to know what keywords you should be targeting. Instead you should be creating unique, descriptive content so in a year you will know.

For example, if you sell bananas, you will inevitably tell me you need to get to page one for bananas. This produces 2 problems. 1 the shorter keyword phrase is much harder to rank for, 2 it’s not likely to be a high converting or money making phrase. Something like buy bananas, or fresh green bananas are more convertible search queries. These longer phrases are created by descriptive content, AND they do support the necessary relevance and content for the bigger box search query bananas.

So after you have some data, you will begin to see in analytics that some phrases you are ranking for, which you may have NEVER thought of trying to…. are making sales. Bingo, that’s a phrase we want to target.

So now that we have covered some geek translations for shop owners, lets cover some do’s and don’ts for your new blog.

1. Do post regularly and about topics related to your whole website theme
2. Do Not post exclusively about sales, products and other marketing venues
3. Do answer every comment you ever receive
4. Do use catchy post titles
5. Do make your posts at least 3 paragraphs <– Yes folks, I mean text
6. Do use images and other media to engage your readers
7. Do encourage comments and discussions from your readers
8. Do use 10 or less post tags
9. Do categorize your posts in a logical manner
10. Do have your blog designed in the likeness of the rest of your website (brand continuity)
11. Do use natural language that all most of your readers can understand and identify with
12. Do try to use some semblance of proper grammar, so your posts can be scanned and read
13. Do have fun and stay positive

Topic selection is a big hurdle for many shop owners… What the hell do i have to blog about?

Well, honestly, this is a tough one for many. You will have to think outside of the box to find your blog’s calling. To start your creative juices flowing consider related groups, events and organizations. How about historical points and tradition, myths, news and hey… Your own personal experiences?

These posts will be the meat and potatoes of your blog, the link bait so to speak. You cannot just run sale ads and product reviews in your blog…. No one shares these much, heck many don’t even read them. When you only market from your blog you seem fake, pushy and certainly uninteresting. So look for the things in your niche that your readers will find value in.

I have used these guys as an example before, but I will again as I am very proud of them. Silver and Pewter gifts is a Zen Cart store who has had their blog for about a year now, but their posts are incredibly intelligent. They go out of their way to find stories, traditions, uses and tips for their products in their posts.

This recent one is a favorite of mine, the post is about Salt Cellars and Shakers… Yeah I know, what the heck is a salt cellar. Well, that’s the key folks, they posted the history and the current trends into a very informative post that also effectively markets their products. Bravo!

Don’t be scared, you can blog successfully… Just loosen up a bit and relate to your site visitors on a more common and approachable level.

Melanie E-Commerce Marketing, Small Business

Are you feeling that “spring is coming” bug? Well, rightfully so, because right now is the time to plan for your spring marketing and tidy up a bit from the winter sales.

Most ecommerce stores have some season trending. This is very unique to both the store and the product line. So a store selling green widgets can be expected to trend sales in a similar manner to another shop selling green widgets… But not exactly, as they are many additional metrics that influence one’s sales.

So you should be planning for your spring and early summer products, marketing and trends now… So that you are prepared for this period in your business. Even especially if traditionally spring is a low volume period for sales.

Here is a checklist of sorts to help you get started for planning any marketing period, including this spring.

Trending: Unless you site is brand new, you should have some sales and traffic data that you can use to trend or predict the data for the upcoming period. I tend to concentrate on sales and traffic. I use both as they can be very unrelated for some websites. There are clearly some periods where even if the traffic is there, conversions are down… So to properly trend our potential for this upcoming period we should use both. You may even have other metrics such as, bounce, average order or similar that are specifically a target for your store.

Gathering the data is the easiest part, as you should be using a proper analytical stat program to record your data. We will use Google Anayltics for our example, as it is very popular.

When gathering your data, we are looking for specific trends within the matching period from previous years to predict, affect and produce a proper marketing plan for the upcoming period. So login to Google Analytics and lets get to work.

So we will pull data for all of March, April, May and June to cover our bases and provide some overlap. You will want to pull at least on year, more if you have them. I would not be concerned with using more than 3 years as things in your business and on the web change very quickly and it’s not likely to be very relevant any longer.

The example store I am using had a 2009 average daily visits of 279 uniques a day. There conversion rate for the year was 3.87%. You can see by the graph that holiday traffic is a crucial part of this store’s success and that spring is rather soft by comparison. You can also see that our spring period it right at or just a bit above average for them.

2009 Unique Visits

We can clearly see from this data, that traffic could be improved for this period…. Especially because they have a genuine promotable product line for spring sales. Now let’s have a look at conversions in relationship with this traffic… Do they convert well in this period?

2009 Conversions

We can see that last year, while traffic was average, they converted pretty well the end part of spring. looks very much like March should be our focus area.

Next you will determine your trend. You can use data from previous tears to do this… But if you lack that data no worries, this old restaurant manager has the equation to get you close.

Obviously, any data you do have is clearly relevant… But let’s say you have little or none. To determine your current rate of growth in both of these metrics we will poll the last 4 months. This is a weighted process with the greatest weight on the most recent data.

This applies to any metric. Gather the data for these metrics for Nov 2009, Dec 2009, Jan 2010 and Feb 2010.

We will start with March’s data from last year 8,043 unique visits and a conversion rate of 3.13%.

• Nov 2009 8,789 & 4.85%
• Dec 2009 14634 & 4.5%
• Jan 2010 7,604 & 3.67%
• Feb 2010 6,395 & 3.52%

For this purpose, with holiday data so much higher we will exclude Nov & Dec, unless we have 2008 numbers… Which we do. Nov 2008 7,419 & 3.18%, Dec 2008 8,861 & 4.00%, Jan 2009 6,146 & 2.99% and Feb 2009 5,742 & 3.22%.

Here is the math:

The math is easier than it looks….

Step 1: YOY growth, which is simply current year minus previous year.

Step 2: Trend. Like I said we will weight this for the most current monthly data. So 100% being the whole, we will use 12.5% from Nov & Dec, 25% from Jan and the remaining 50% from most current Feb. Something like this:

• 1 part : Nov. 18.49% plus Dec. 65.15% = 83.64 divided by 2 = 41.82%
• 1 part: Jan. = 23.72%
• 1 part: Feb. =11.37%
• 1 part: Feb. =11.37%

= The whole (88.28) divided by 4 = (22.07%) Current Trend

Last year March (8043) apply trend 22.07% = (1775 growth) This year March forecast (9818) unique visits… Into 318 average daily visits.

Check our math:

Last year average daily visits March = 260

This year forecast = 318

% of predicted growth = 22.3%

**Note that rounding changes these just a hair, but not to worry this should be pretty reliable data.

So this “math” can be applied to the entire period as a whole, or each month individually computed. The point here is to have an idea of what to expect, AND and basis to measure the effectiveness of your marketing this spring. For example if you did nothing last spring, and you know (above) what to expect if you do nothing this spring… Then you have a pretty good benchmark to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign this spring.

Melanie E-Commerce Marketing, Small Business